Linux Journal has announced the winners of its 2002 (8th Annual) Readers' Choice Awards. According
to Linux Journal, [a]lmost 6,000 Linux Journal readers visited
the Linux Journal web site and voted on their top choices in 25
categories. KDE took the honors in the Favorite Desktop
Environment category, and KMail
in the Favorite E-mail Client category. Grab the November
2002 Linux Journal issue (#103) from your nearest newsstand
to read more.

KMail is the best.... of what sample?
Sure, it gets well up there near the very top of the Linux mail client league, and beats LookoutDistress hands down. But Demon's Turnpike product is still sufficiently much better to keep me running a 'doze box.

In KDE 3.2 you will be able to do everything with the results of a "search messages" operation what you can currently do with the messages in one folder. Actually the results will be displayed in special "Search folders". The cool thing is that you can keep those "Search folders" and that they will be dynamically updated each time new messages arrive or messages are deleted.

these are known as Vfolders in the gnome world. Evolution has had these for a while, and i've found theme extremely useful. for example, i have a vfolder entitled "Last 24 hours," which displays, oddly enough, all the mail that i'v received in the last day.
i'm really excited about kmail, however. i've been leapfrogging back and forth between gnome and kde for the last three years, and hope to jump back to kde once 3.1 or 3.2 is released.

I'm pleased with the improvements in 3.0; but still, I'm really looking for cross-client compatibility. When I open Maildir with KMail, it marks *all* the messages as read! Evo and Mutt then get confused. I really want to use KMail and get off Evolution, but I can't yet because it conflicts with procmail...

I agree. You wouldn't think this kind of behaviour would be too much to ask. I just want to be able to choose between mutt and kmail, but it's actually very hard to find a set up with Maildir where they can BOTH work reliably.

Interesting hypothesis. Let's test it... Let's see... I'm 45, assemble coherent thoughts, respond rather than react and use and develop on KDE. I just got an email last week from a retired teacher with a PhD (many years my senior) who was very happy with his latest compile of Quanta. This dog don't hunt.

KDE... the choice of sophmoric 14 year old trolls for irrational bombasts? Gotta be. Mom got you this computer and all we got was this lame flame bait. Better luck next time. Okay, go back to the Britney Spears fan page now. Come back when you start shaving, okay?

I have been using Kmail for a few months and I keep running
into difficulties, most of them having to do with Kmail refusing
to throw away messages I marked as deleted (yes, I have tried
all tricks in the FAQ and in the bug reports).

Admittedly I have a complicated mail setup: at home I read
mail on a disk on host X mounted with NFS to host Y, and
every time I go to my work, I 'scp' the various mailfiles
and indexes to host Z, which is my PC at the university.
And yes, host Z runs one of the stable KDE's (3.0.3) and
at home I have 3.1 beta 2.

Somehow I feel that the file- and directory setup of Kmail
is too complicated. With the other mailclients I am familiar
with, it never was a problem when I shifted files around by
hand. Heck, that is what an xterm is for, isn't it?

Anyway, I keep running in problems and I am amazed that nobody
else does. I cannot be *that* stupid, and even if I am, Kmail
and KDE should be usable for stupid people too, just as the
Netscape 4.6 client that I used before Kmail, was very usable.

Having said that, I must thank Ingo Kloecker for
his patience; he really must be fed up with my whining, but
he keeps answering patiently.

KMail is much, much better than it used to be (I'm using a stock Mandrake 9.0 now) but I still end up falling back to Mozilla. Kmail crashes about once an hour, and doesn't work properly after that unless I restart KDE. It's also very slow in browsing my mail folders (which are very large). Mozilla never crashes and is much faster ...

Oh and before people ask about backtraces etc., no I haven't submitted a bug report for a while because recompiling knetwork with debugging would take an age (slow laptop), and getting sources over dialup is just horrible.

I'd love to use KMail, and I'll keep trying it again each time I upgrade Mandrake, but it's not stable enough yet (for me anyway).

It exists - it's called "Extra Gear" (a slightly punny title). It's non-official KDE applications that are synced with KDE releases and available to be packaged by the various distros at the same time KDE releases occur. (Of course, they are always available, but I tend to upgrade my apps when KDE upgrades).

Thank you. Yes, in work, and still few things convincing. For example :
- Kbear is not here
- KreateCd is here, KonCD no. However, there are rpm for KonCD, but no rpm for KreateCD (as I searched few days ago), so I think that KonCD would be a priority...
- It is written "There are multiple possible reasons for an application to not be in one of the KDE modules, for example: duplication of functionality
very specialized" But KBear, KreateCD/KonCD are not in duplication and the functionnalities are not specialized. So I do not understand that these programs are not directly in some KDE modules.

In conclusion, I hope that not specialised and not in duplication programs will go in KDE moduls, the others in KDE Extra Gear, which is interesting, of course.

Well, there *is* the possibility that the author of KBear doesn't want to be released with KDE - that she or he enjoys the freedom of a relaxed schedual, etc. You have to remember that Free and Open Source software is a community of developers, and each project has it's own directions and choices. The KDE project did its part by extending the invitation to projects outside of KDE's scope, but that isn't a mandate that all KDE applications *have* to become part of Extra Gear - simply an offer.

And as for your late sentence, KDE Extra Gear *is* a KDE module - that's the whole point. It's the module for "everybody else's applications" - there's the standard KDE gear ("gear" as in 'stuff' a la 'fishing gear', not the mechnical toothed wheel), and then there is the extra gear.

Yes, I understand about the choice of authors. Nevertheless, I think that a FTP client or a burning CD program is not an "extra", they have to be inside the "standard", because anybody needs such a program...

I see in Mandrake gFTP and xcdroast, I think that they are bad programs when I compare with Kbear and KonCD, absent of the distro. Why absent ? Because Mandrake has bad taste and because KDE doesn't include in its standard these good essential programs...

And, again about the choice of authors, I doubt that they don't want to include their program in the distros...